How To Effectively Use NLP Anchors To Your Advantage

What are anchors? In NLP, it is understood that neurons that fire together at the occurrence of an incident, retain the same memory for later on. To illustrate with an example, let us assume that you enjoyed the taste of the papaya fruit for the first time by the beach. Thereafter you had the same fruit every day morning for breakfast and enjoyed its taste.

Now if you happen to see papayas in our grocery store, you buy them and enjoy the fruit for the next day’s breakfast. The orange fruit would rekindle the same feelings that went through you when you were on the vacation, eating the papaya. The first juicy bite will flash the same scene that happened on that day by the beach. This happens every time you eat the papaya.

Technically you have “anchored” your vacation to the fruit. Now, this anchoring action happened involuntarily. The best part, however, is that one can deliberately anchor any emotional experience to any other gesture of his/her choice.

Using NPL Anchoring

The technique to be followed is this, if you want to anchor your current emotion to an action, like gesture of the hand or touch or a specific sound, make sure that the emotion is rising and is nearing the peak.

That instant is the right time to set the anchor. Set it for 5 -15 seconds. If the emotion is not rising after all, the anchor need not be set.

To illustrate yet another example of how to deliberately set an anchor, think of an instance when you were exceptionally curious in the past. It could have been just before your birthday when your parents got you a gift but hid it from your view. You were inside the house, while they were both outside, trying to find out where it was hidden.

Recapture the feeling of trying to find out what it contained, whether it was something that you had asked for, how you tried to shake the box, and what it looked like, etc. Some feelings rush through you. Your curiosity was then at its peak and at that point you can anchor a gesture to that particular emotion, like touching two fingers together and pressing them. This helps you to set the anchor.

To encapsulate this anchor, which makes it stronger, it is suggested that the “screen is cleared” once the anchor is set. This can be done by thinking of another action completely unrelated to whatever was happening now.

The “screen clear” thought could be how you brushed your teeth in the morning. Now that the anchor has been created, using it at the right time, deliberately, to help in other situations, is the whole idea.

If you are planning to read a book or do research on a topic, and want to get curious about it, bring your two fingers together and press them the same way you did before. Bingo! The same curious feelings surge through you and you are mentally ready and more curious to take in and understand more.

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